


everyone needs a place. it shouldn't be inside of someone else.

by hasitsclaws



Series: we're inconsolable. [1]
Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Drabble, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:10:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/pseuds/hasitsclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He never wanted to touch her before, if it makes any difference. Was the first to punch some sick son of a bitch in the face when they even looked at her the wrong way. But they’ve been moving along together for eight months, wearing the tragedy from that night on their sleeves, over their hearts. The hurt and loss is so sewn into them now, it’s just a gaping wound that only the other can fill.</p><p>part one of the 'we're inconsolable' drabble series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everyone needs a place. it shouldn't be inside of someone else.

**Author's Note:**

> Short drabble au for seth/kate.
> 
> part of my 'we're inconsolable' drabble series

He doesn’t know when it turned into this-- this sort of routine where they dip and dodge over each other like they’re waiting to step on a landmine. And yet their hearts beat so in-tune it’s like they’re fucking right there on the dirty motel floor when he’s just trying to get up the nerve to touch her face.

 

He never wanted to touch her before, if it makes any difference. Was the first to punch some sick son of a bitch in the jaw when they even looked at her the wrong way. But they’ve been moving along together for eight months now, wearing the tragedy from that night on their sleeves, over their hearts. The hurt and loss is so sewn into them now, it’s just a gaping wound that only the other can fill.

Kate isn’t Richie, and Seth knows that. He’s not trying to replace his brother with a fragile, broken teenage girl either-- he’s _not_. But she makes the loneliness better, likes killing the monsters that ruined their lives as much as Seth does himself.

A common fucking thief that doesn’t kill anybody that doesn’t deserve it-- they deserve it.

Kate turns eighteen on a warm spring day, and she looks different.

Seth can’t put his finger on it, because he knows that usually people aren’t any different on birthdays, always feel the same, just another year older and none the wiser. But Kate is _different_ , tangible, r _ea_ l.

After that night, he was tempted to just leave her there in the lot of the Titty Twister, a strip bar turned into a graveyard like a filthy fucking cliche. Told her to go home because he may be a bastard, but he’s not a _fucking_ bastard.

But then she looked at him, big green eyes and blood on her face and she said, “You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything, princess,” he told her, because he couldn’t deal with the words, the extra guilt. Her father and brother were dead; his brother was-- _is_ \-- a walking, talking corpse under the control of some Mayan cunt from the goddamn _Underworld_ , of any fucking place it could have been. All he could focus on was tracking Richie down, making that Demigod bitch _fix_ this.

“You and Richie are the only reason my family was ever here,” Kate spit right back, as much venom as those vamps in the bar. “I don’t care what Santanico said, about it being fate with us being here. _Me_ being here to lure Richie. If _you_ hadn’t decided on us to be your cover, then Scott and my dad wouldn’t be dead. I wouldn’t be all alone. It’s your fault. You _owe_ me. I’m coming with.”

Their time together started with terse silence, trading in the RV for a used car, touring around Mexico looking for leads on where Richie could’ve gone. They found their first nest of vamps a month into the trip. It was by a stroke of luck, really. Seth wanted a drink, something hard to get the way she cries in her sleep at night out of his head. So they stopped in some backwater bar and some asshole got grabby with Kate-- when she turned around and punched him right in the nose, new set of hardened knuckles shaped from tragedy, the fucker bared fangs and it was a new bloodbath to tangle with, an adrenaline rush.

The kind of thing Seth has always lived for.

Somewhere in the melee, he got scratched too deep, close call with scores down his arm, right over his tattoos. It hit the past, present, future all at once. Kate dragged him out of the bar, into a new grungy motel room and patched him up. She touched him softly, like he was fragile, like he needed to be taken care of. It was the first time anyone had ever treated him like that, and he thinks maybe that’s when everything started going downhill.

Their hunts after that turned into teamwork. It was easy to fall into that kind of routine, but with Kate he’s much more...protective. He always knew that Richie didn’t need to be watched in a fight, not until that last, fleeting moment. Yet every time they’re taking the pain out on a new set of fangs, Seth's eyes always instinctively flitter back to Kate. She’s just so small, so ready for revenge it blinds her

Nevermind she always has a higher body count than him.

Sometimes, after, when they'd lay in their separate beds at night and he heard her crying for her family in her sleep, he would grab her hand dangling in the small space between them and she’d go quiet. Rolled over to face him, wide awake.

They never talk about it, and Seth’s kind of thankful for that.

On their second hunt he kept her from getting her throat torn out and she looked at him and said, “I hate you,” like it was gratitude, like it didn’t splinter his already broken insides.

He thinks maybe the reason eighteen seems to change her so much is because it technically means she’s not a child anymore, even though he figures Kate hasn’t been a child for a long time. Maybe even before the Titty Twister, back when her mother died and Richie found her bleeding in that pool, hurt leaking out as he’d so vividly described it.

Seth knows his brother’s had his hands on her, _inside_ of her, but it doesn’t make a difference-- Richie’s had his hands inside of Seth too, since they were kids and he pulled him out of heat and smoke and darkness.

He knows he owes it to Richie to track him down, end it, get Kate home safe, unsoiled anymore than she’s already been.

But he can’t help himself, not when she smells like sunlight and sin, brushing out her hair and dripping on the comforter of their cheap motel room, hurt leaking out.

Seth lets his hand linger too long on her bare shoulder when he gets her attention to say he’s taking the next shower, and, Jesus Christ, she _lets_ him.

They go to some small bakery and he gets her a cupcake to celebrate; there are no candles and he knows she wouldn’t ask for any in the first place.

“Happy birthday, princess,” he says to her, and she just sort of smiles, but it isn’t the smile of an eighteen year old girl.

Far from.

It didn’t take long after that first hunt for them to start talking.

“Do you really think we’ll find Richie?” she asked once, words so small he barely heard her over the static on the radio.

“We’ve got enough money to look until we’re dead,” he answered, because that’s exactly what he’s been planning to do since Richie stopped breathing and started drinking blood.

“And we’ll kill every, single one of those things in our path?” she asked.

He looked over at her, not really all that shocked to find her starved in the way she was asking it. Something broke inside of the both of them in that bar, and he knows that what she needs to fix it is to kill everything that played a part in her family dying. He knows this because he needs the same.

And that’s why he said, “Yes,” to her and he meant it.

Still means it, right down to the core.

They’ve had several hunts since then, gotten into a real web of hunters. Here past the border, they're a lot less closed minded. More people know about vampires than Seth would like to think about, and a lot of them fight back. It's a goddamn epidemic, really, and Santanico Pandemonium is right at the epicenter of it all.

At least that makes for better leads on where she took Richie.

 

"I want a tattoo," Kate says after she finishes her cupcake-- she gave him half and he's still got the frosting on his fingers, swallows dryly when she reaches out to bring his hand to her mouth and _suck_ the sugar off the pad of his thumb. "Please?"

"Please?" he answers, head gone numb as she sets his hand down.

"Can I get a tattoo?" she asks. "You have one. I want one too."

_I'm coming with._

"Yeah," he says, because he can't deny her anything. "Sure. Why not."

 

Seth remembers a time when they tried a false lead about Santanico near the tip of South America, how it'd been a trap. And one of the fuckers got too close, tore Kate open across the back and he had to carry her into some little town hospital after he slaughtered them all for hurting her.

It'd been nothing but blinking lights on the horizon and Kate's lessening breath that kept him carrying on even though he'd gotten pretty torn apart himself.

He was so worried while she was getting stitched up that he puked twice, and when she finally came out, pale, bruised, _alive_ , he hugged her so hard he popped a few stitches.

 

She has the scar from that one along the lines of her back, and she says she wants the tattoo _there_ for her birthday.

She gets a rosary, of all things. The chain follows the lines of the scar, and the cross sits just under the crook of her arm, shaded and an angry, irritated red.

“For my dad,” she says, then she points to one of the beads and he can see the outline of a shotgun barrel in its depths. “And for Scott.”

  
They drive for miles looking into false leads, and when she smiles at him over the rim of her sunglasses, he thinks that it should be illegal to make a place inside of someone the way she has with him, the way he has with her. They’re all each other’s got until this is finished, but he doesn’t know how either one of them can ever come through.


End file.
